Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:29:30 UTC, Rob Braun <[email protected]> 
wrote:

Hi Rob,

> However, it is freely available and at least partially open.  As

Could you describe "partially open"? I just had a look at 
opendarwin.org and couldn't really find much about how much of the 
code is open except the statement "The source code is available via 
the web at:" and the big list with source. Does this contain the whole
Mach Kernel including the BSD personality, I/O Kit, networking layer 
etc?

I've read the "Kernel Programming" guide at apple.com, for me Darwin 
is by far the most interesting kernel out there at the moment so I 
would like to invest some time into that as well.

> Apple provides Darwin, it is not very useful.  However, that is not
> to say Darwin is useless.  Apple has not given it a use.  This gives
> us the opportunity to create a use for it.  Several people here are

I do have some ideas in this reagard and I do have a team of 
developers who would probably joinging those efforts in case there is 
a fair chance that we can reach our goals.

> working to give Darwin a purpose.  The first step is making it so you
> don't have to be Superman to build Darwin.  Significant progress 
> has been made in this direction.  From that point, actual development
> can begin, and it can become useful for whatever purpose we want.

Do you have a Wiki somewhere where the current progress is documented?
I just found the todo-wiki which doesn't really describe how to build 
it and where to get what.

[...]
> We could also take darwin in a direction of attempting to be a useful 
> desktop system, by bundling X and one of the many window managers/desktop 
> pieces of software.

Yes, that's the part where we probably would like to step in as well. 
What's the status of device drivers, can device drivers from MacOS X 
be used on Darwin? I talk about low-level stuff now like IDE drivers, 
not graphics drivers or such stuff related to the GUI.

cu

Adrian

-- 
Adrian Gschwend
@ netlabs.org

ktk [a t] netlabs.org
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